Been busy getting the house ready to sell, so haven’t had time to write about my Iron Brewer entry.
Every year Iron Hill in West Chester is kind enough to supply our homebrew club with wort containing mostly Pilsner malt. Then everyone who participates brews any style of beer they like. The only rule is you can only add 1 lb of fermentables. Any other specialty malts must be in a minimash.
This year I brewed a Belgian dark strong ale. The wort we received was Pilsner plus cane sugar. It measured about 1.075. Here’s my recipe:
Fermentable: 1 lb D2 candi syrup
Minimash: 1.5 lb caramunich (46L), 1 lb Aromatic, 0.5 lb Special B, 2 oz chocolate malt
Added grains to 1 gallon of wort, and kept at 155F for 30 min. Then drained the grains and batch sparged with 0.5 gal hot water.
Boiled for 75 min. Added 1.2 oz Cluster hops (7% AA) for 60 min, then 0.5 oz Saaz (4.2%) for 30 min.
Chilled overnight, and pitched Wyeast 1762 (~350 billion cells) to 58F wort after aeration by shaking for 5 min.
Fermented at 68-70F for three days, then moved up to 72F today. I’ll keep that at 72F for about 1.5 weeks.